Generally, most computer data access systems require the user to have a computer terminal with a keyboard, or other equivalent device (e.g. card reader or tape reader in older systems), in order to initiate access to a data base in a computer. A few systems have been developed for telephonic communication with computers. These systems, however have generally had a limited verbal vocabulary and have been designed for use in a specific application (i.e. with a specific computer, using a specific data base, for a predefined task). Only one system known to the inventors (developed by the inventors and the assignee) allowed use of an unlimited verbal vocabulary, but was still limited to use of a single application on a single host. As with other earlier systems, this latter system required programming the host computer to interact with the telephonic data access system.
It is therefore a primary object of this invention to provide a system for telephonic communication with a plurality of remote computers that are not specially configured for use with the telephonic communication system.
A further object of the invention is to provide a multi-channel communications system that accepts Touch Tone (a trademark of AT&T, hereinafter called DTMF, for dual tone multiple frequency) encoded commands from a telephone caller and that can translate encoded text (e.g. ASCII text) from a plurality of distinct data bases into verbal English (or any other language), regardless of the content of the data base.
Still other objects of the system are for each channel to emulate a computer terminal acceptable to the host it is accessing, to be able to program the system to extract selected data from the data retrieved from a data base and to translate and route to the user only the extracted data. Furthermore, the user should be able to create responses using DTMF encoded signals for transmission to selected destinations.